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I recently got a puppy. Her name is Penny and she is a 13 week old Lab mix. Other than being completely adorable, she’s also a whole lot of puppy craziness. In just a few short weeks, she’s completely turned our house into a disaster area, and my husband into a babbling pile of puppy-loving goo. Even my teenage son, who’s always been afraid of dogs, is completely smitten. It’s amazing how much influence one little black fur-ball can wield.

I’ve started posting “pup-dates” on Facebook for my friends, called “Pupsanity 101”. Several of my friends also have puppies, and are going through the same stages of puppy-hood. One even suggested I make t-shirts out of my Pupsanity posts. That’s a definite possibility, but I’ll share them here first. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do writing them. 🙂

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Earlier, I had to do something out at our reception desk. While I was there, I caught part of #Outnumbered on Fox. The panel was discussing the TG bathroom issue. Herman Cain said, “What I don’t want is some pedophile, some guy with a beard, putting on a dress and saying ‘I’m going to go into the ladies’ room today.’ I don’t want my 17 year-old granddaughter around that.” The ladies were immediately (thankfully) all over his shit.

I’m so agitated right now, I can’t even think. This discussion has been going on for a little while now; obviously, not long enough to resolve the issue, but long enough that stupid comments like these shouldn’t still be coming out of otherwise (supposedly) intelligent human beings’ mouths. Yes. I said stupid. If this is your rationale, it is stupid. No, it’s more than just stupid. It’s fucked-up stupid. Please note: I didn’t say “you’re stupid”. I said that rationale is crazy, fucked-up stupid. Okay, originally, I didn’t say “crazy”. But yeah, it is that too. It’s also ignorant, nasty and just plain wrong.

Why? Because you’re not targeting the people who are going to do harm to children. If you were concerned about that, there would be a lot fewer pedophiles on the streets, in our schools, our churches, our CONGRESS…no, you dont’ care about the children. You just think you do because that’s comfortable. Hey! Newsflash. Life ain’t comfortable!

So, here’s my question for all of you concerned parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, pastors and congressmen: what if it was your family being hurt? No, not by the bad man with a beard, wearing a dress lurking in the stall next to your kid.

What if it WAS your kid? Your scared, lonely kid, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with him/her; getting picked on, bullied, even beaten up in school on a daily basis; never fitting in with anyone and having absolutely no idea what they did to deserve this living hell; wondering how hard would it be to just go to sleep and never wake up. What if it was your child? Would you turn your back on them? Because every transgender adult was a transgender kid at one time, and it was even worse for them because this wasn’t even a discussion when they were younger. At least now there’s hope. Some of us, many of us, dare I say, *most* of us, are fighting for those kids and the adults they have and/or will become.

So, if you’re one of those folks with the misguided notion that the Boogeyman is suddenly now going to be able to put on a dress and hide out in the ladies’ room (because before there were *so many* laws stopping them), please stop and think before carrying on with your misguided crusade of hatred. Educate yourself and stop talking out your ass. You don’t have to approve or even fully understand. Just accept the humanity and move on with your life. Some of us would really like to be a tolerant, respectful nation of human beings, just trying to look out for one another.

Finally…and truthfully…if you are one of those perpetuating this crazy, stupid, fucked-up rationale for denying individuals their basic human dignity, get the hell away from me. I don’t care who you are, I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Believe me, my (our) lives are better without that shit in it.

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I can no longer post funny stories about my teenage son on Facebook without him becoming embarrassed. The kid’s a corker though, and some stuff just needs to be shared. I’m such a mom! So I’m borrowing a page from Convos with My 2 Year-Old, (a dad’s video blog that, if you haven’t already, you really need to check out), and will blog about our conversations instead. To even further maintain his privacy, as well as my plausible deniability in future defamation suits, he will henceforth be known simply as “Dude”.

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March is rough. Come mid- to late-February, I start dreading March. It gets harder and harder each day, until the 19th passes and I can start to breathe again.

They say grief eases with time, and it’s somewhat true. It’s not the daily struggle to just get out of bed like it was the first year. It’s more like an aimless wandering of thoughts and emotions, some high…some low. Unless you’ve been through what I have, it’s hard to understand.

Today is March 3, 2016.

It’s been 30 years since I lived what was probably the best period of my entire life; a charmed existence teens dream of; a seemingly endless stream of concerts, parties, and tightly knit friends. Work was mixed in there somewhere, if you can call it work. It was too much fun to be work. Whatever it was, I first started developing into the person I am now right there and then.

It was amazing.

I had no clue.

Man, I wish I could go back, just to revisit those kids and tell them.

Not to chose a different path. Just to make the one I was on a little different, maybe a little easier? Maybe a little longer.

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I found this post in my draft folder. I wrote it quite a while ago. I find it amusing now that it’s almost Mother’s Day, so I thought I’d share. Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there.

I was talking to a friend the other day and the topic of college came up. I admitted that although I’ve attended numerous schools and have switched majors about six times (not an exaggeration), I still do not hold a degree. She looked at me like I was bat-shit crazy. I have a lot of theories as to why I never finish, but not so much why I keep changing my mind about what to study.

I keep coming back to one central concept: I don’t want to work.

I know that sounds lazy, but it’s not. I DO work. I have worked incredibly hard and enjoyed it. I have also done the most mundane tasks and enjoyed the crap out of those too. I have earned my own living to support my family. I definitely can work. I just don’t want to do things that I don’t like and once I stop liking something, I’m pretty much done. Then it’s time to move on.

There is one thing that I have done that I’ve always loved, always strived to be my best, always tried to be perfect and of which I am most critical. It’s my longest running job to date and the one thing to which I sincerely wish I could devote all of my time and energy.

I’m a mom.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve ever wanted and I could classify everything else as being either a hobby or an inconvenient necessity.

I love staying home, sweeping floors, doing laundry, baking cookies. Nothing makes me happier than afternoons by the pool or playground, hearing “Mom, watch this!” a hundred thousand times while re-reading the same page of my book over and over again.

I don’t want to be a lady of leisure. Being a mom is damn hard work! I would definitely like to have “hobby jobs” to get out of the house, talk to grown-ups and do something I like. A career? No. That’s really, honestly and truly not me.

But yeah…that’s it. They don’t teach “MOM” in school, so that’s why I’ve never landed on my thing. After my kids have gone off to school and their own lives, I think I’ll go back too. I’ll learn how to do yet something else. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy being Mom.

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I’m going to take the plunge and do what I’ve been thinking about for the past five or six years. I’m going to actually write about myself and all the screwed up crap that has made me who I am today. The difference between this time and previous attempts, is that now it will all be coming from a good place. I’m not depressed, pitying myself or angry anymore. It all is what it is and I can’t change any of it.

What I can do is write about it and hope that by doing so I help myself grow and find peace. I also hope that some of my stories will resonate with others and help them find peace. At the very least, I hope they know that they are not alone. Because truly, that is the one thing that saved my life – knowing that while I may be unique, my struggles are not. I can survive them and be happy.

No worries. I’ll still be writing about all the funny things too. After all, there is always more than one side to a story.

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I am so tired of having to have complicated passwords. Why do I have to have one capital letter and one number for the password to my grocery store account? If that actually got hacked, what is at risk? My penchant for SmartOnes frozen lunches? OMG, they may steal my gas points!! I mean…seriously? That’s the worst that’s going to happen.

Years ago, I tried to simplify my life and create three levels of passwords for online activity. I had one simple password for all my non-critical interactions; one more complicated password for email, etc.; and one very cryptic password exclusively for my bank account. Then shit got complicated and websites started putting more demands on me. The problem is that their level of importance didn’t fit into my nice, neat password boxes. So, I met the criteria by capitalizing the first letter and adding a number at the end. Problem solved, right?

Not even close.

They added punctuation.

Sigh.

Okay, so I added a random punctuation mark in the middle of my now capitalized password with the number at the end.

At this point, I’m up to about 85 passwords to remember – my email password, my bank account password and 83 variations of the cheap, useless password, which were supposed to be easy to remember. Okay, I can do that.

New problem. They don’t tell you what the password format is for each individual website. This starts a whole game of “guess which fucking password you used the last time you shopped at Target.com you dipshit you”.

P.S. The thing that I failed include in this entry is all the times that I ran through the 82 possible password variations, clicked on the link for my “forgotten password” reminder and discover that I simply had a typo the very first time.

P.P.S – I also failed to mention all the times that I forgot my username, because your username can’t be your real name, email address or anything that you could even remotely identify with.

P.P.P.S. – Oh, I forgot to mention the variations of my secret question because of a phase I went through where I got tired of trying to answer secret questions and just answered everything “blue”. This regularly has me screaming at the computer “YES THAT IS THE NAME OF THE STREET WHERE I GREW UP!! YOU DON’T KNOW ME MOTHERFUCKER!!” “Oh, sorry…it’s “blue”.

P.P.P.P.S. – This doesn’t even begin to cover my work email, where you have to change the password every six months.